| Ponary massacre | |
|---|---|
 One of six Ponary murder pits in which victims were shot (July 1941). Note the ramp leading down and the group of men forced to wear hoods. | |
| Also known as | Polish:zbrodnia w Ponarach |
| Location | Paneriai (Ponary),Vilnius (Wilno),Reichskommissariat Ostland 54°37′35″N25°09′40″E / 54.6264°N 25.1612°E /54.6264; 25.1612 |
| Date | July 1941 – August 1944 |
| Incident type | Shootings byautomatic andsemi-automatic weapons,genocide |
| Perpetrators | SSEinsatzgruppe Lithuanian collaborators |
| Ghetto | Vilnius Ghetto |
| Victims | ~100,000 in total (Jews: 70,000; Poles: From 1,000[1] to 2,000[2] Soviets/Russians: 8,000) |
| Documentation | Nuremberg Trials |
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ThePonary massacre (Polish:zbrodnia w Ponarach), or thePaneriai massacre (Lithuanian:Panerių žudynės), was themass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, byGermanSD andSS and the LithuanianYpatingasis būrys killing squads,[3][4][5] duringWorld War II andthe Holocaust in theGeneralbezirk Litauen ofReichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary (nowPaneriai), a suburb of today'sVilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary,[a] along with up to 2,000 Poles,[10] 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formedVilna Ghetto.[3][11]
Lithuania became one of the first locations outsideoccupied Poland in World War II where the Nazis mass-murdered Jews as part of theFinal Solution.[b] According toTimothy Snyder, out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilna, only about 7,000 survived the war.[13] The number of dwellers, estimated by Steven P. Sedlis, as of June 1941 was 80,000 Jews, or one-half of the city's population.[14] More than two-thirds of them, or at least 50,000 Jews, had been killed before the end of 1941.[15][16]
FollowingŻeligowski's Mutiny and the creation of the short-livedCentral Lithuania, in accordance with international agreements ratified in 1923 by theLeague of Nations,[17] the town of Ponary became part of theWilno Voivodship (Kresy region) of theSecond Polish Republic. The predominant languages in the area werePolish andYiddish.[18] After the Nazi-Sovietinvasion of Poland in September 1939, the region wasannexed by the Soviets and after about a month, on October 10, transferred to Lithuania under theSoviet–Lithuanian Treaty.
Following theSoviet annexation of Lithuania and the Baltic states in June 1940, construction of an oil storage facility began near Ponary for a future Soviet military airfield. That project was never completed, and in June 1941 the area was taken by theWehrmacht inOperation Barbarossa. The Nazi killing squads used the six large pits excavated for the oil storage tanks to hide the bodies of the locals killed there.[19][unreliable source?]
Themassacres began as soon as SSEinsatzkommando 9 arrived in Vilna on 2 July 1941.[13] Most of the actual killings were carried out by theYpatingasis burys (Lithuanian volunteers) 80 men strong.[16] On 9 August 1941,EK 9 was replaced by EK 3.[20] In September, theVilna Ghetto was established.[13] In the same month 3,700 Jews were shot in one operation, and 6,000 in another; rounded up in the city and walked to Paneriai. Most victims were stripped before being shot. Further mass killings by Ypatingasis burys[13] took place throughout the summer and autumn.
By the end of the year, about 50,000–60,000 Vilna Jews—men, women, and children—had been killed.[15] According to Snyder 21,700 of them were shot at Ponary,[13] but there are serious discrepancies in the death toll for this period.Yitzhak Arad supplied information in his bookGhetto in Flames based on original Jewish documentation augmented by theEinsatzgruppen reports, ration cards and work permits.
According to his estimates, until the end of December, 33,500 Jews of Vilna were murdered in Ponary, 3,500 fled east, and 20,000 remained in the ghetto.[21]: 215 The reason for such a wide range of estimated deaths was the presence of war refugees arriving from German-occupied western Poland, whose residence rights were denied by the new Lithuanian administration. On the eve of the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in June 1940, Vilna was home to around 100,000 newcomers, including 85,000 Poles, and 10,000 Jews according to Lithuanian Red Cross.[7]
The pace of killings slowed in 1942, as ghettoised Jewish slave-workers were appropriated by the Wehrmacht.[13] As Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the Nazi units tried to cover up the crime under theAktion 1005 directive. Eighty inmates from theStutthof concentration camp were formed intoLeichenkommando ("corpse units"). The workers were forced to dig up bodies, pile them on wood and burn them. The ashes were then ground up, mixed with sand and buried. After months of this work, the brigade managed to escape on 19 April 1944 through a tunnel dug with spoons. Eleven of the eighty who escaped survived the war; their testimony contributed to revealing the massacre.[22][23]
The total number of victims by the end of 1944 was between 70,000 and 100,000. According to post-warexhumation by the forces of Soviet2nd Belorussian Front the majority (50,000–70,000) of the victims werePolish Jews andLithuanian Jews from nearby Polish and Lithuanian cities, while the rest were primarily Poles (about 20,000) and Russians (about 8,000). According to Monika Tomkiewicz, author of a 2008 book on the Ponary massacre, 80,000 people were killed, including 72,000 Jews, 5,000 Soviet prisoners, between 1,500 and 2,000 Poles, 1,000 people described as Communists or Soviet activists, and 40Romani people.[24]
The Polish victims were mostly members of the Polishintelligentsia—academics, educators such asKazimierz Pelczar, a professor atStefan Batory University, priests such as Father Romuald Świrkowski, and members of theArmia Krajowaresistance movement.[11] Among the first victims were approximately 7,500 SovietP.O.W.s shot in 1941 soon afterOperation Barbarossa began.[25] At later stages there were also smaller numbers of victims of other nationalities, including local Russians, Romani and Lithuanians, particularly Communist sympathizers (Liudas Adomauskas, Valerijonas Knyva,Andrius Bulota, and Aleksandra Bulotienė) and over 90 soldiers of GeneralPovilas Plechavičius'Local Lithuanian Detachment who refused to follow German orders.
Information about the massacre began to spread as early as 1943, due to the activities and works ofHelena Pasierbska,Józef Mackiewicz,Kazimierz Sakowicz and others. Nonetheless the Soviet regime, which supported the resettlement of Poles from theKresy, found it convenient to deny that Poles or Jews were singled out for massacre in Paneriai; the official line was that Paneriai was a site of massacre of Soviet citizens only.[25][26]
On 22 October 2000, a decade after thefall of communism, an effort by several Polish organizations raised a cross to fallen Polish citizens, in an official ceremony attended byBronisław Komorowski,Polish Minister of Defence, and his Lithuanian counterpart, as well as severalNGOs.[27][25][28]
On the site of the massacre is a monument to the victims of the Holocaust erected in 1991, a memorial to Polish victims erected in 1990, reconstructed in 2000, a monument to soldiers of Lithuanian Local Squad killed by Nazis in May 1944, erected in 2004, and a memorial stone to Soviet war prisoners, starved to death and shot here in 1941, erected in 1996, as well as a small museum. The first monument on the site was built by Vilnius Jews in 1948 but was replaced by the Soviet regime with a conventional obelisk dedicated to "Victims of Fascism".[29]
The murders at Paneriai are currently[when?] being investigated by theGdańsk branch of the PolishInstitute of National Remembrance[4] and by the Genocide andResistance Research Center of Lithuania.[30] The basic facts about memorial signs in the Paneriai memorial and the objects of the former mass murder site (killing pits, tranches, gates, paths, etc.) are now presented in thewebpage created by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.
The massacre was recorded by Polish journalistKazimierz Sakowicz (1899-1944) in a series of journal entries written in hiding at his farm house in Wilno, Lithuania. After Sakowicz's death in 1944, the collection of entries were located and found on various scrap pieces of paper, soda bottles and a calendar from 1941 by holocaust-survivor and authorRahel Margolis. Margolis, who had lost family members in the Ponary massacre, later published the collection in 1999 in Polish. The diary became important to tracing the timeline of the massacre, and in many instances gave closure to surviving family members on what happened to their loved ones. Written in detail, the diary is a testimonial written from a first-person witness account of the atrocities.[31]
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